This past weekend I spoke as part of the Poor People’s Campaign event: The Necessity of Moral Resistance in the Face of Militarism. Reverend William Barber was, of course, the main speaker, and if you are uncertain as to how war and militarism play a role in the demands of the Poor People’s Campaign or in the way war and militarism have always played an oppressive and devastating role in our society, then please listen to Reverend Barber’s sermon as he clearly and definitively explains those two things. My talk, on the effect of war on veterans, is here below, while Reverend Barber’s sermon and the comments from Phyllis Bennis are in the Youtube clip below. Wage Peace.

After almost 4 years I decided to give Twitter another try. I’m at @MatthewPHoh if you’d like to follow. I do interviews on a few radio and TV shows each week and so I figure Twitter might be a good, and simple, way to share those appearances.

With the assistance I’ve gotten from the doctors and the staff at the Durham VA Hospital, I also feel I am much more capable in handling the deluge of information that comes from Twitter and social media. An overabundance of information is something that easily overwhelms me cognitively and emotionally because of my TBI, Neuro-cognitive Disorder and PTSD. So let’s see how this works for me. I’m confident I’ll be able to handle it due to the training I’ve gotten from the VA to manage, adjust to and cope with the various issues in my brain. 🙂

$5.6 trillion, with no end in sight. That’s the cost of America’s wars since 9/11.

But as a Marine who served in Iraq, I don’t need a price tag to tell you about the cost of our wars for veterans like me. I’ve seen for myself the amputations, traumatic brain injuries, post traumatic stress disorder and moral injury that all lead to massively disproportionate levels of suicide, depression, substance abuse, domestic violence and homelessness in veterans returned home from war. And I’ve witnessed the human cost of our wars beyond our borders, in Iraq where I was stationed and for millions around the world.

Today, Veterans Day parades will celebrate the bravery of servicemembers, and I will be remembering those who were alongside me overseas. But before Cold War hysteria took over, November 11th was Armistice Day — a day for peace. The original Armistice Day marchers, veterans who survived the killing fields of the First World War, carried banners declaring “Never Again.” Imagine if we had listened to those veterans. Instead, our country continues to pour troops into stupid, bloated, and deadly wars.

$5.6 trillion by next September works out to $310 billion per year to prop up our endless wars. That’s $23,386 per taxpayer per year. Slice it however you want, it’s an incomprehensibly massive number. And instead of asking ourselves if a single penny is worth it, we just keep freefalling into gargantuan war debt.

As for the spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical costs of my time at war — we won’t ever pay those off. Neither will the friends I remember today who died for a country that won’t acknowledge the cost of their loss. Neither will our families and communities who continue to shoulder the burdens of our service long after we leave the battlefield.

That’s why Rep. John Lewis is speaking up to demand a public, national conversation on war financing. His amendment to Trump’s tax bill would prohibit cutting taxes on the rich — a loss of revenue that would add right onto our pile of war debt — until we get our troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and eliminate the war deficit gobbling up our budget.

I would go farther than that and say that our war culture and our society’s militarism is killing our Nation’s Spirit, just as it is killing people, the environment and our future both at home, in the United States, and across the planet.

Tonight, I’ll be with Reverend William Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove in Raleigh at The Gathering, the monthly meeting of Repairers of the Breach and the Poor People’s Campaign. This month Veterans For Peace, Iraq Veterans Agains the War and Code Pink are partners and I’ll be speaking. You can listen online or if you are in Raleigh you can join us.

Below is the announcement for tonight’s event:

Tax payers in the United States have spent nearly $4 Trillion for wars since 2001 – money that should have been used to transform our nation.

Just $1 Billion of our bloated military budget could pay for 12k elementary school teachers, 7k infrastructure jobs, 100k headstart spots for children, and 30k scholarships for university students. The moral question we must put before America is: What will make us safer? More and more and more money for building the mother of all bombs, money for jobs, education, healthcare, and infrastructure? We must choose community and peace over chaos and greed, recognizing that to fight against the war economy is to challenge the policies that advance poverty, and suppress democracy.

This Sunday, Nov. 5 at The Gathering, we’re partnering with Veterans For Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, and CODEPINK to hear from people affected by militarism around the world on how we can join the struggle for peace.

The Gathering is a new movement resource by Repairers of the Breach, live on the first Sunday of every month in North Carolina and available via livestream and podcast. It’s co-hosted by us, Bishop William J. Barber II, Pres. & Sr. Lecturer of Repairers of the Breach; and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Director at School for Conversion. The Gathering aims to equip communities with resources for faithful reflection and public action on moral issues through an hour of storytelling, music, interviews with community organizers and impacted people, and a powerful call to join the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.

“There is no forgiveness in this loudly and righteously proclaimed Christian nation, only the scapegoating of a young man and his family for the failures of immoral and unwinnable wars.”

Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl’s guilty plea begins the end of this phase of an embarrassing, sad and morally absurd saga of American history. Sergeant Bergdahl, who was dismissed from the Coast Guard because of mental illness, recruited into the Army in spite of such issues, and then sent to the frontlines of Afghanistan where he walked away from his base and was captured, kept as a prisoner, and tortured by the Taliban for nearly five years, has been offered almost no compassion, sympathy or forgiveness by large swaths of the American public, political classes, veterans and the media.

The shameful blood-crazed calls for vengeance against Sergeant Bergdahl, screamed across Fox News, talk radio and Twitter, by millions of Right Wing Americans have begun again today with Sergeant Bergdahl’s guilty plea. Despite an army investigation finding no Americans were killed by Sergeant Bergdahl’s departure of his unit; despite the Pentagon admitting it was known that Sergeant Bergdahl was in Pakistan within a few days of his capture, thus negating the validity of the Right Wing talking points of continuous search missions for Sergeant Bergdahl that jeopardized American lives; despite the general who led the investigation of Sergeant Bergdahl’s disappearance stating Sergeant Bergdahl should not be punished and the colonel who led the Army’s version of a grand jury trial recommending the same; despite the United States military’s top prisoner of war expert testifying that Sergeant Bergdahl endured more torture at the hands of the Taliban than any American prisoner of war has endured since the Vietnam War, undoubtedly due to his multiple escape attempts and unwillingness to cooperate with his kidnappers; and despite repeated calls made by President Trump for Sergeant Bergdahl to be executed, as well as calls for retaliation against the military if Sergeant Bergdahl is not sent to jail by Senator John McCain, clear and blatant forms of wrongful and illegal command influence prohibited by military law against a defendant, Sergeant Bergdahl finds himself today having entered a guilty plea and putting himself at the mercy of a US Army judge.

In time, Sergeant Bergdahl may become just a footnote to America’s wars in the Muslim world, wars that have killed well over a million people since 2001, but his individual story relays the fundamental truths of these American wars against Sunnis and Shias, and Arabs, Africans and Pashtuns, (nearly all the people we have killed, maimed and made homeless have been Muslim and dark skinned) that there is no logic to our violence, only the unending and insatiable requirement for more war and more destruction, and there is no forgiveness in this loudly and righteously proclaimed Christian nation, only the scapegoating of a young man and his family for the failures of immoral and unwinnable wars on the murderous altar of the twin godheads of American Exceptionalism and White Supremacy. Sergeant Berghdal’s story does not just inform us of the madness of our wars overseas, but highlights our wars here at home; for our wars abroad come from the same root causes as our wars at home.

It was Sergeant Bergdahl’s parents standing outside the White House with President Obama that began the rage against him and his family. This was the treason that so angered and upset the white conservative audiences of Megyn Kelly and Rush Limbaugh. Sergeant Bergdahl’s white parents standing at the White House with that black president and thanking him for freeing their son began the scorn, the vitriol and the outrage against Sergeant Bergdahl, his mother and his father. The audacity of Jani and Bob Bergdahl, released themselves from the captivity of the unimaginable nightmare of the imprisonment and torture of their son for five years by the Taliban, to stand with Barack Hussein Obama and to give him thanks was a betrayal to the usurped, rightful and white structures that underlie so many white Americans understanding of United States history and society.

The grand mythology of American militarism, a key pillar of both American Exceptionalism and White Supremacy, does not allow for figures such as Sergeant Bergdahl. The greatest military in the history of the world is a required statement of faith for all American politicians and public persons, even though the American military has not achieved victory in war in over seventy years, so an explanation of collusion and cooperation with anti-American and anti-white forces is necessary to provide the causation of such an undermining. Of course, once Bob and Jani Bergdahl stood with President Obama, the racially fueled reactionary political anger appeared in Facebook posts and twitter rants and the lies needed to sustain that anger and turn it into a useful political tool arrived: Sergeant Bergdahl attempted to join the Taliban, Sergeant Bergdahl gave information to the enemy, Sergeant Bergdahl got Americans killed, Sergeant Bergdahl had anti-American beliefs, Sergeant Bergdahl’s father is a Muslim…all claims that were untrue and disproved over time, but such a straightening of facts is almost always inconsequential to those whose identity is an abominable mix of race, right wing politics and nationalism. People of such a type as those who believe Jesus is ok with them carrying handguns into church, demand that Santa Claus can only be white, and that the Confederate flag is a symbol of a proud heritage, have little time or consideration for the particulars of anything that triggers the base tribalism that dominates and informs their lives.

The fundamental aspects of Sergeant Bergdahl’s disappearance were well known and documented years prior to that White House announcement of his release. Veterans organizations called for his rescue and return at rallies and Republican senators enacted legislation to help release him . “Bring Him Home” and “No Man Left Behind” were echoed repeatedly by Republican politicians and pundits, and even Ronald Reagan’s most famed acolyte and Fox News hero, Oliver North, wore a Bowe Bergdahl POW bracelet. However, to be white and to stand tearfully and gratefully alongside that black president is unconscionable and unforgivable to many “true Americans” and so the parents’ sins became the son’s and Sergeant Bergdahl’s treason was a dog whistle to those who believe anti-whiteness and anti-Americanism are inseparable.

For the man who used race so overtly and effectively to become President of the United States, calling during his campaign for a traitor like Sergeant Bergdahl to face the firing squad, or be thrown out of a plane without a parachute, was a rudimentary requirement in order to Make America Great Again. Even General James Mattis, who hung outside his office a horseshoe that had belonged to Sergeant Bergdahl and had been given to the general by the sergeant’s father, understands the political importance of Bergdahl’s treason. General Mattis who previously had supported the soldier and given great comfort to the family, now, as Secretary of Defense, is silent. I believe Secretary Mattis to have higher ambitions than simply running the Pentagon and keeping that white base of support in his favor is not anything such a savvy and cunning careerist, such as James Mattis, would imperil.

We will soon know what, if any punishment Sergeant Bergdahl is to receive. Hopefully, he and his family will be spared further pain and they can begin rebuilding lives that were shattered by the unending war in Afghanistan and then shattered again by the race-fueled partisan politics of the unending war against people of color in the United States. For Bowe Bergdahl, a young man who never should have been inducted into the Army to begin with, his suffering is testament to the viciousness, callousness and hate that dominates American actions both at home and abroad. We deserve no forgiveness for what has been done, and may still be done, to him and his family.

Over the last month I have done a series of four interviews with Blase Bonpane on his show World Focuson KPFK Radio. You can find the link to podcasts and the transcripts of the interviews here. I’ve pasted below the transcript of the second of the four interviews we did together as that was the interview I found to be most inspiring as we spoke about Brian Willson, the NFL, the Gospel of Matthew, Bob Dylan and a few more usual topics like North Korea, nuclear weapons and Donald Trump.

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World Focus – October 1, 2017 Matthew Hoh

Friends, we’re very happy when we see a documentary film going up into the regular movie houses. That’s what’s happened with the film on Paying the Price for Peace: The Story of S Brian Willson. This is produced and directed by Bo Boudart and narrated by Peter Coyote. The associate producer is our dear friend Frank Dorrel. It will be shown in the Awareness Film Festival this year. The film is very special, and reaching a growing audience.

Brian has just written another great book called Please Don’t Thank Me For My Service. Here’s David Hartsough writing about it. “I believe it’s the same caliber as Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the US, and shares a truth in story which needs to be heard by people of this and future generations.” That’s Please Don’t Thank Me For My Service by the officer who lost both of his legs protesting war in Nicaragua at the Concord Naval Weapons station, where vigils were going on twenty four hours a day to stop the aid to the Contras who were devastating civilian life in that country. So we’re proud of this, both the movie and the new book by Brian.

The great awakening continues. It’s not only in football, that incredible, historic story that continued to unfold this past week. It’s also at our bases. Seven drone protesters were arrested Monday morning at the Hancock Field Air National Guard Base in DeWitt. The Upstate Drone Action protesters blocked the entrance to the base with several large signs and banners, and refused to remove them.

“Officers from the base came out and told us to leave, and when we didn’t, we were arrested,” Upstate Drone Action founding member Ed Kinane said. “We’re trying to make a statement about the war crimes being committed at the air base with drones that kill human beings.” The protesters said they placed a “huge dollar sign dripping with blood in the main entrance way to the base. “The six-foot high dollar signs dramatize what the group believes determines the many overseas wars the Pentagon/CIA engages in: Corporate greed,” Upstate Drone Action said in a news release announcing the arrests.

We’re just very proud of the awakening that is taking place internationally. And friends, I have the good pleasure today of having a return visit from Matthew Hoh.

Welcome, Matthew Hoh.
Matthew: Thank you for having me on, Blase.

Blase: I’m sorry you were too sick to participate in No War 2017. They were certainly expecting you, but everybody can get sick and it’s always a surprise to us. But they got through this weekend, clearly demanding an end to the war system – just as George Washington said he wanted to see happen “more than anything” in his life, the end of the great stupidity of war. Do you have any comments on the conference, as you understand it?

Matthew: First I’d just want to refer back to what you said about Brian Willson and the film about
him, Paying Any Price. I’ve seen the film; it’s an incredible film, and what stood out to me – and I think it’s a valuable piece of art and history, a terrific documentary – was that while the title deals a lot about Brian Willson, he’s not the sole focus. Brian is a hero to so many of us and such an incredible person who has done so much for so many, given so much. What the film also does – what Frank Dorrel helped do with that film – is tell the story of the peace movement during the 1970s and 80s into the 90s, something that my generation doesn’t know much about because we were kids then. So when I was playing guitar or riding bicycles, these men and women were doing incredible work for peace, staging these massive demonstrations, doing really historic and sacrificial acts on our behalf. We now as adults, here and in other countries, are simply not aware of this great recent history. So the film is a terrific homage to Brian, and deservedly so, but it’s also a great history of the peace movement in the 1980s. It really is, and it helps people like myself and those younger than me understand where the peace movement has been and to understand where we need to take it. It’s just a valuable, valuable experience to watch and to learn. And it’s a great work of filmmaking, done in such a way that if you’re completely unaware of the peace movement’s activities, it is a riveting film, so well done.

Blase: Yes, and we’re so happy about it because we have to decide whether we’re going to be the “empire” that our forefathers constantly talked about…I was reading the autobiography of Alexander Hamilton recently, a brilliant man who was really George Washington’s right hand man, but they did foresee an empire, and I think we have to make a slight change of course to say that we will be a republic, a nation, but we will not be an idol to be worshipped or complain when there is protest, we will not say that our football players are evil and should all be fired…here are people non-violently protesting our air bases on our ball fields, and in the meantime the wars are going with no punishment whatsoever. Now, I think that we must remedy this situation and become a member of the global family. How are we going to do that?

Matthew: I think what we need to do, Blase, and I, like you, am so inspired to see what has occurred in the National Football League this week where about 200 players staged non-violent protests against racial oppression and injustice in this country. And I think what we need to do to move forward is – and you mentioned our brothers and sisters up at Hancock Air Base near Syracuse, New York, who were arrested this week for their action – what needs to occur is people need to really realize that the fundamental thing that those NFL players are protesting and what our brothers and sisters in New York were protesting, that militarized police and mass incarceration and the world’s largest prison population, which the US has, and the murder by flying robots, the drone assassination program, and the fact that we’ve killed a million people overseas since 2001 in Muslim countries – we have to realize that those two things are connected, that they are intertwined, that the wars we have here at home are the same wars we have overseas. And we have been in this place and will continue to have a society that seeks violent solutions in order to maintain its wealth and to satisfy its greed, in order to enrich a few people while oppressing so many, we must confront it both at home and abroad. The actions of the football players and the folks up in Hancock from the Catholic Worker and others up there, the actions of those two groups, as disparate as they may be, young African American men in the prime of their lives, early twenties, incredible athletes, multi-millionaires, while the folks up in Hancock – again, many from the Catholic Worker – tend to be older, not so wealthy, probably not going to be playing a game of football anytime soon- but what they are doing, what they are fighting against, that oppression, that violence, that hate, and what they are trying to achieve, is all united; the same fundamental system of injustice and oppression and violence serves as a foundation for both. We need to make sure that we no longer fight these things separately but fight them together.

Blase: Many people might not understand that these players were from across the country. We’re talking about members of the Buffalo Bills, the Denver Broncos, the New York Saints, the Miami Dolphins, Cleveland Browns, Philadelphia Eagles, Seattle Seahawks – I’m only mentioning a few. This is awesome. This is historic. This is a statement to the world that we do not have a religion of state, that we do not have religiosity of government, that we do not worship idols. We do not worship flags. We simply have a flag that represents us, but the important concept in this country is We the People, not We the Flag, the flag is a symbol and we are not symbols. We are people who at this time are suffering greatly because we don’t have the healthcare or education of civilized countries. We have one of the highest illiteracy rates in the industrialized world, we incarcerate two million people, the highest in the word, we deny food to hungry people – this is all because we buy things with our taxes that we have no say over. Countries like Germany list what the money was spent for. Now, when it comes round for April 15, they ought to say this amount went for cluster bombs, this for napalm, and the largest amount is going for nuclear weapons that are likely to destroy the planet. We are entirely out of our minds. The president is breaking the law when he speaks and threatens millions of people in a country about the size of California. Here he’s threatening them and committing a crime in front of the whole world. You don’t threaten people. It’s a crime. It’s a part of preparations to initiate a war of aggression, and it has to be dealt with.

We can’t allow banks to immorally take homes away from five million people. We can’t allow our tax money to be used to bail out the banks that can’t even handle the money they’ve stolen. All of this is waiting to be done while we listen to the president commit crimes. Today is the day we celebrate the life of Stanislav Petrov, who saved the world by refusing an order to allow a nuclear weapon to be fired by the Soviet Union. He saved our lives by saying that is an immoral order, that is an illegal order. And now a film is coming out with Kevin Costner and Matt Damon to celebrate the life of Stanislav Petrov.

We must take our heroes where we can find them. Our people, our troops, cannot obey illegal orders. They are forbidden to. And here we are apt to receive this illegal order, and they must not obey it. We’re in a rather critical moment, don’t you think?

Matthew: We are. And it’s wonderful to hear that film is being made, I didn’t know. A film about Petrov. It’s so great that he’s getting the recognition. We are at a critical moment. I think, you know, none of this started with President Trump. It’s no coincidence that the Black Lives Matter movement had to occur while we had our first black president. The system of racism and oppression, the system of greed, it feels threatened, and when it feels threatened it reacts, it reacts violently and tries to suppress and oppress. That’s what we’re seeing right now. And what occurred with the NFL players is that they’ve been threatened themselves. They realize that just because they play for the premier sports league in the world, and are among the world’s greatest athletes, and multi-millionaires, does not exclude them from the wrath of this injustice, oppression and hate. If they step out of line, they will be put back into it – and that’s why you saw the president saying what he says to these young men (and there were not many, at that point, who had protested over the last year or two). When the president felt threatened by the actions of a few, he then threatened the many – and they responded. A great thing. And the other thing is that earlier this month Michael Bennett, a professional football player who has been very vocal in his protest and his support for work against racial injustice and oppression, he was a victim of police aggression in Las Vegas not so long ago, this summer back in August. They put a gun to his head and threatened to blow his head off if he moved, all because Michael Bennett was a large black man and in the wrong place at the wrong time. So I think for the professional football players, they are not immune from this system of racism and hatred and greed and violence. And that’s why you’ve seen so many speak out. It is just wonderful to see this movement moving forward.

Blase: We see the great work of Bill Moyers. He did a lengthy interview with Dr. Robert Jay Lifton on the Goldwater Rule. And it’s a duty to warn if someone might be dangerous to others. And here he is applying it to the president. He says,

“There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the work of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health experts to assess President Trump’s mental health. They had come together last March at a conference at Yale University to wrestle with two questions. One was on countless minds across the country: “What’s wrong with him?” The second was directed to their own code of ethics: “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn” if they conclude the president to be dangerously unfit?”

Now this is a very high level, professional approach to this problem. Just as we need desperately these wonderful football players, we need those in the professions as well to come out. The lawyers. Make it clear that a threat is a crime, and a threat of aggressive war is a massive crime. All this has to come out now. We can’t sustain our nation and continue in the direction we’re going.

As we read, North and South Korea want a peace treaty. That’s what they want. And we must join them. They’ve wanted it for a long time. They want the war to be over. And now we’re threatening their country as never before. Is there enough interest at this time in that problem?

Matthew: I think what we’ve had this six months with Donald Trump, and particularly this last week or two where he had stood at the United Nations before world leaders and delegations and spoke so casually and yet so forcefully about destroying an entire people, about laying waste to tens of millions of people, without flinching, without any suggestion on his part that there may be something like a soul in him that would resist such an idea. I think that has really struck many people who haven’t been struck by how heinous our system has become overall. We have to look at the whole system. If we remove Trump, we still have an awful system in place that’s based on racism and oppression and hate. But this system has allowed us to put a man into power who is willing to threaten the deaths of millions and millions of people, with the thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons he has. And he has many people who will do his bidding. That is what is equally terrifying – not only is this man threatening in unlawful ways, as you put it so well, but there are so many others standing behind him who simply look at their feet when he makes these remarks. The fact that we have a man who threatens the death and destruction of millions of people with nuclear weapons. And nobody stands up and says, this is wrong – this is the most alarming thing to me, the fact that we have this man who can carry forward as he pleases without the rise to stop him that needs to be done – but I think that is coming. We can see it in the actions that have occurred, such as the actions of the football players. People are recognizing that we live in a world in which what happens to other people happens to us, that we’re tied together. I talk often about how we have our endless wars now, we have these military generals, three of them who are in positions in the White House. Secretary of Defense, National Security Advisor, and the White House Chief of Staff. All generals, and they view the world through military eyes. So we now have military objectives around the world that are only for the military themselves, so that is what these endless wars have created, strictly military policies that only have military objectives solely for the benefit of the war itself in a continuous cycle. We have to talk about what the consequences of climate change will be because we are enduring those consequences now – and this is what the consequences of endless war are. Overseas we are killing people every day, with our drones and our air strikes, we’re supporting other armies that are doing so, or over here where we are letting people die without the care they need or putting them in prison in a massive incarceration system that is just oppressing vast segments of our population. It is all tied together, and I think that the imagery of this man standing at the United Nations, this man Donald Trump threatening – this image holds it all together.

Blase: We see the workers getting into it with the demonstrations at the drone base. We see the doctors getting into it with Dr. Robert Jay Lifton warning us that he and his colleagues have a duty to warn that this man is dangerous. And the Lawyers Guild by way of Marjorie Cohn, that the courts have to hold the executive branch accountable for drone strikes. Now this is entirely doable, and this goes back to Marbury v Madison; the court can declare an act of the president unconstitutional and do the same to the congress. It has the power of judicial review, and the lawyers are saying let the Supreme Court get into this and declare that what is being done is illegal. They have that authority, they’ve used it previously, and it’s been with us for over two hundred years. It goes way back to I believe 1803.

So we have a serious legal situation going on in the midst of these threats and rumors of war. It sounds like chapter 24 of the Gospel of Matthew – war and rumors of war, famines and floods in various places, nation shall rise against nation, my God! I want to go out with a sign that reads, the end of the world is near! It’s really a serious situation that we find ourselves in at this precise moment. So, on the Korean issue, I wonder if people understand that when you’re talking about two nations that are in lock step together, they’re sealed at the hip, and you used weapons of mass destruction against the “bad one,” you’re going to kill everybody in the “good one” too. Does anyone understand that? And that’s not even to mention the Chinese and the Japanese. One of our senators, Lindsay Graham, said he didn’t care if it killed everyone in South Korea, Japan, China, we have to stop this. I mean – my God. I think we can stop it by another way. So what are your thoughts at this time on the Korean situation?

Matthew: You reference Matthew 24 there. I just reread it the other day with the idea that the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, which was an awful experience for the Jews 2000 years ago – the Romans came in and just obliterated Jerusalem. But reading that again for me, my take away was that the corruption that had existed between the Jewish authorities and the Roman Empire and the selling out of the Jewish law and the Jewish God to the Roman Empire, as corrupt and evil as it was as well, and then the second half of that, the corollary to that was that the response to that oppression, to that corruption and violence, that awful system, this unity of a corrupt Jewish religious authority and a corrupt Roman Empire, was a violent rebellion, which resulted in the complete desolation of Jerusalem and the temple. So by trying to save and fix through violence, the Jewish rebels ultimately set the conditions for the destruction of what they were trying to save. It was an important thing for me to read to re-emphasize the need for us, however we go forward, to do it in a non-violent manner, and to do it with the divine spirit that motivates us to fight oppression, to fight against racism and violence. We cannot become those forces ourselves, because it will lead to our own destruction. It’s interesting that you reference that, Blase, because I had really just read Matthew 24 a couple of days ago. So it really heartens me to be able to speak about that and to note that what we are going through now is not any different than what other peoples have gone through in history. We can overcome, we have the ability to overcome and to fight these despots, these systems of violence, these injustices. We have the ability to do that, and people have done it before. But we have to remember to do it in a manner that is consistent with the purposes that we are trying to achieve. Otherwise, we become like the very thing we’re trying to bring down. It’s important for us to remember that. And to keep it foremost in our thoughts as we go forward.

I’m so glad you brought up those provisions in the NDAA that President Obama supported and his utilization of rendition and the kidnapping and assassination of people. Supposedly Obama wouldn’t misuse this power. Well, now we have a man who will misuse it, and just recently they reduced the oversight and the regulation surrounding the drone and manned airstrike assassination program. Whereas before people who were assassinated by our drones or aircraft, that had to be approved at the presidential level. Now it can be approved by people many levels down from the president. They have the authority to assassinate people without presidential approval, so we are so far gone from a place of due process and judicial review and so into this military authorized assassination program, these military authorized killings and the mass murder that they involve. It’s just another vein or avenue that the system has now used to enable itself to utilize. American military officers can choose to assassinate

people around the world without our political system being involved. It was heinous enough before when the political system was involved with assassinations with complete disregard for judicial process and our constitution and our values and beliefs in life and human rights. But now we have devolved down to where military officers can kill people at will. It really is a very scary place for us to be.

Blase: This is classic imperial behavior. Whether people are believers or unbelievers, or people who like Jefferson who looked at it and tried to take every section of the New Testament that he could make sense of and put it down in my thinking. If we do that at this time, it can be very helpful to agnostics, to atheists, to people who call themselves Christians but are frequently an embarrassment to all of us. We can take a look at what is spiritual. The use of the word “world” is a very negative thing in these writings. It refers to greed, to war, to hunger and the evils we see today – so the world is a negative, and the objective is to do the will of God on earth as it is in heaven. We don’t have to put heaven in order; we have to work for the world, which is out of order. Then we look at the amazing writing of Paul, and we find that his metaphors are practically all either military or sporting. He constantly uses those terms. I run toward the prize. My entire attention is on the finish line. And the things of this world have to be put down. Dismiss all anxiety. Rejoice and fight. He is constantly using these references as a spiritual warrior. Once again, in Guatemala we were called guerillas of peace. Here he’s talking about spiritual warriors and he calls them my companions in work and battle. It’s a metaphor for fighting the good fight in peace and non-violence. And then I see in your writings a reference to the peace movement as “divine.” Now that’s a most interesting phrase for you to use, Matthew.

Matthew: I’m not a believer myself. I am an adherent of Jesus, but I’m not a Christian. What I’ve found over the last years, as I have worked with Veterans for Peace both here in the United States and abroad, and have been a part of delegations from Veterans for Peace that has joined with resistance groups in Okinawa, Japan, in Palestine, in Standing Rock, and of course in action in Charlottesville VA after the violence had occurred there back in August with Iraq Veterans Against the War, which is now called About Face – what I have seen, and what united these resistance groups around the world is something beyond the human experience. What drives them forward and makes them steadfast and unwilling to submit or be coopted by the same forces that are oppressing them, is universal and goes across time – it’s something that I could not put my finger on or describe with any other words than the word divine because it was something that was beyond our human experience. It was something supernatural to us as material physical and cultural people. It seemed so in contrast to these people who were fighting

against militarism, against violence, who were seeking to protect human beings, their air and their water, the resources that keep them alive, that will keep their children alive, is this presence that is so antithetical to the forces that they are fighting against. I had to use the word divine to satisfy the description. As these people allow you to walk with them and be in solidarity with them, and for myself, as a white man who served in the US military and was an occupier in Iraq and Afghanistan in pretty senior and effective ways, to allow me to come in and be with them where I am the very prototypical person who has been leading the oppression against them whether they be the Okinawans, the Palestinians, the Native Americans, the African Americans, and to be so welcome and to be made a part of their resistance with no questions asked, that graciousness is something that again is so antithetical to the things they are fighting…it can only come from a place outside of human explanation. So that’s why I used the word divine. These people cannot and will not be defeated, and this element of the divine explains why they don’t succumb to using violence and why they don’t succumb to the forces that are trying to coopt them. They are united across continents, across races and religions, and across time. It has been an incredible experience to participate and to extend solidarity over the last year or so.

Blase: Well, I think you say that so well because what ruined religions is a focus on dogmas which are telling people “I know all about God.” The only answer is, no you don’t, you don’t know anything. We haven’t even begun to understand. What leads us to fight – Protestant, Catholic, Sunni, Shia, Hindu, Muslim etc – the real guts of the whole thing are what are called the divine fruits of the spirit, which are love and compassion and courage, and engagement with people. We find that in music, I mean just looking at something here – this could be right out of biblical literature, and perhaps it’s better than a lot of that writing, Bob Dylan’s “Come You Masters of War, you that build all the guns, you that build the death planes, you that hide behind walls, you that hide behind desks, I want you to know that I can see through your masks. Let me ask you one question. Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness? Do you think that it could? I think you will find, when your death takes its toll, all the money you’ve made will never buy back your soul.” Now that is divine.

Matthew: Absolutely. And it ties into the importance of the word “worldly” and the material things that the system uses, what people filled with hate and greed use to split us. And by using worldly resources, or worldly privileges, or worldly possessions, we are forced to divide ourselves into have and have nots, to protestants and catholics, black and white, to ensure that me and mine receive more than they and those. It really is such an important thing to remember and to recall that difference between the spiritual, the divine, the otherworldly, if you will, and the material, the physical. What side are you on?

Blase: The president is asking us to take a mode of idol worship, which is common in imperial situations, you look at the divinity of the government and worship the idols of the government to focus on being upset by kneeling before the flag in protest to something higher than that is a spiritual act and should be praised. People going around assassinating others with drones are being praised, and here our football players are being called filthy names insulting their mothers and them because they don’t believe in idol worship. We do not worship our flag. The people are an autonomous group that has the power to get rid of a criminal president and to get rid of all criminals in government and to establish a republic, not an empire, and live with the 96 percent of people who do not live in the United States, to live with them in peace, and to understand that we are a planet of colors, we have a lot of colors, I’ve never met anyone who was completely white who was not dead, so we all have colors, so we can’t fight over stupidities, over what are called accidents in philosophy, we must deal with the essentials of peace and justice…and a sense of compassion and of creating what Dr. King called a Beloved Community. It is entirely possible. Sometimes there has been some success in it, and we’re extremely happy to see that, we’re happy to see people who know that they will never obey an illegal order. And any use of a nuclear weapon is ILLEGAL. We are not allowed to commit genocide. We are not allowed to engage in aggressive war.

We should be able to understand all of this and see that as a result of this, as Paul says, peace will be with you – the concept of the coming of the Messiah was peace on earth, goodwill to everyone. Well, where is it? That’s what they called for – peace on earth with goodwill to everyone. You can lovingly put someone in to some kind of restraint if they are a psychopathic killer. It can be done with love, not hate. You can create a beloved community, and that is what our goals and objectives are as we stand on the verge of a terrible war.

Another book just coming out here is called The Great White Hoax: Donald Trump and the Politics of Race and Class in America, which features Tim Wise, who has written so much on race. He’s one of the nation’s most prominent anti-racist writers. He wrote White Like Me, Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son.

So I hope you’re not feeling too badly today, and hope you feel better as a result of this discussion!

Matthew: Oh yes, I feel better – these last few days I just got hit by this bug. I was in New York when it hit, and the United Nations General Assembly was occurring, and I actually saw Donald Trump drive by; my cousin and I were drinking a cup of coffee on 51st street, and Donald Trump and his motorcade drove by on Thursday. They closed the street off. For anyone who has not seen a presidential motorcade drive by, it is just a massive, massive display of vehicles and 25 or 30 motorcycle cops and tow trucks and ambulances and secret service vehicles and men with rifles and swat teams…it just goes on and on. And you can see Trump waving, just at the height of his personal power, a man who just loves threatening the world with violence.

Blase: We’re very happy that some of those who are experts on race and have spent much of their lives on race consider this action of the football players as extremely positive. Harry Edwards, a professor at the University of California, puts it well. “Mr. Trump has managed to precipitate something that all of us activists and intellectuals and media types would never have been able to achieve. Through his ignorance, impulsiveness and vindictiveness, he has done more to put our movement on track and move it forward than any other individual in history.” Here is someone who has spent his whole life on this problem, and he says, well, Mr. Trump first of all threw the owners under the bus, and forced them to choose between the alt-right and their own players, and they knew that if they didn’t stand on the right side of these issues and stand with their players, they signed their last free agent, they probably would have had a great deal of difficulty signing their draft choices, and they’d have tremendous problems in the locker room because of the perception of what the owners stood for who took Mr. Trump’s advice. The owners were afraid of the players.

Matthew: I also think that many of the owners are close to the players. So all these white owners have a relationship with these young men and their families that many people don’t have. And as these young men were so courageously taking a knee, and as they were booed and you heard the filthy awful racist things that were yelled at them – it was clear that none of them actually have relationships with African Americans. So a lot of it came down to this – the owners were not only put on the spot, but I think it became personal to them as well because they know their players and they know that they are good people who share the common presence of humanity that they share as well. So what Trump did with these billionaires, these super rich people who own football teams, that spark of humanity was touched because Trump forced them to realize that his racist hatred and rhetoric was being directed against people they knew and loved.

Blase: Well, Matthew Hoh, we’re out of time, and I have been so happy to have you on the show today. Matthew: Thank you, Blase.

I have a benefit tonight that I am speaking at in support of Palestine. In the toast I am to give, I will reference other struggles against oppression and occupation, particularly those resistance struggles that I was grateful to be given the opportunity to stand with in solidarity this past year: in Okinawa, at Standing Rock and in Palestine.

For someone like me, who had professionally studied war and insurgencies for years, and then executed such knowledge on behalf of the US government in support of the occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, being on the other side of the rifle was heartbreaking and difficult, as seeing the military and police enforcing the racist occupations, political oppression and environmental destruction was a mirror held up to me, reflecting my own past, my own mistakes, my own collaboration with greed, hate and subjugation. Being allowed the opportunity to stand with these resistance movements was rewarding and it was healing, as it was a form of recovery for my moral injury and guilt from the wars. I can never undo or repair what I took part in in Iraq and Afghanistan, but I can, going forward in my life, live a life working with others for peace and justice, both at home and abroad.

Veterans For Peace members march in Hebron, Occupied West Bank, February 2016. Photo credit: Ellen Davidson, Veterans For PeaceMembers of Veterans For Peace and Palestinian Youth Against Settlements leader Issa Amro intercede with the Israeli police and military to stop firing in Hebron, Occupied West Bank, February 2017. Photo credit: Sabah Media

The commonness and similarities that exist between these resistance movements are many: a firm belief in and understanding of non-violence; the use of music and song; and the graciousness and openness to outsiders, like myself and other white veterans of the American military whose relationship to the occupation forces and powers cannot be ignored or dismissed, but are understood as the actions of the colonial and imperial powers and not the actions, will or soul of the individual soldier, or Marine in my case.

Veterans For Peace members and Okinawan resistance members block the road in Okinawa to protect the Yanbaru forest from US military construction, September 2016. Photo credit: Mike Hastie, Veterans For Peace.Members of Veterans For Peace and Okinawan resistance members resisting attempts by Japanese police to move them as they protect the Yanbaru forest from US military construction, September 2016. Photo credit: Mike Hastie, Veterans For Peace

There is also something that runs very deep, is very true, and that exists within all these resistance movements. Something prime and underlining, a force that is infinite and enduring is the intangible reality that exists in all of the men, women and children who are struggling for their society’s freedom, for the preservation of their land, water and air, and for the chance for their children and grandchildren to live lives not held in obeyance to the guns and violence of a foreign, abusive and repressive power. I have no other choice for my description of what I witnessed and stood among than to use the word divine to explain what it is that moves, sustains and carries forward these movements and people. Words like justice, peace, freedom, and safety have their well deserved places as descriptions of what these movements strive for, but it is the word divine that I come back to when I think of what it is which motivates, maintains and upholds these movements and what it is that links them together across continents, religions and races, and, ultimately, time.

Tarak Kauff and Matthew Hoh of Veterans For Peace participate in a non-violent action with Native American water protectors to block construction of the DAPL pipeline, October 2016. Photo credit: Ellen Davidson, Veterans For PeaceVeterans For Peace members Matthew Hoh and Tarak Kauff are arrested along with Native American water protectors while conducting a non violent action to block the DAPL pipeline, October 2016. Photo credit: Ellen Davidson, Veterans For Peace.

I saw this again in Charlottesville a few weeks ago, where myself and other white allies escorted black students from Howard University through the city streets. There was something divine, again a better word I stumble trying to find, behind the purposes of those students from Howard, a very existent and timeless connection to something beyond the human experience that animates our desires for truth, justice, equality and peace. This force, this beyond-human force, ties together these movements now, and ties them to the movements of the past, to their ancestors who suffered and were persecuted in their struggles of liberation, fights for peace, and marches for equality, whether there be a direct lineage of descent to those ancestors or an ancestry consisting of purpose and principle removed by epochs of historical and geographic separation.

I’m an intellectual, logical and rational atheist a good 6 1/2 days a week, but what I experienced in Okinawa, Standing Rock, Palestine and Charlottesville these past twelve months moved me with a force much greater than any and all of the spirited nationalist formulations or conceptions of brotherhood I ever encountered or beheld in my time as a Marine or while working for the US government. This force, this divine presence, cannot be discounted, diminished or dismissed, but is as factual and proven to me in its effect and purpose as any rifle I ever held, any money I was ever paid, or any exceptionalist American myth I ever consumed.

It is why anyone who has taken part in these movements can receive healing from their own sins in war, as I have; it is why even those who have been silenced by jailing or with bullets and bombs have never truly been defeated – lost to us with great sorrow and grief, yes, of course – but not defeated; and it is why these movements will ultimately be successful, because the divine that is the foundation of these movements and these people cannot be extinguished, cannot be undone, bought or quieted, as this spirit will always carry forward this generation and subsequent ones.

To see and understand some of the divine involvement that is present in the people of Palestine and the Palestinian Popular Resistance movement, please watch Chris Smiley’s latest video of the Veterans For Peace delegation I participated in to Palestine earlier this year.

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Some Photos To Show How I Got Here (Nov. 2015)

I see this and I wait for King Kong to come out of the mists. But he’s a myth. Don’t let myths define you, don’t let outdated and irrelevant stories propel you, take your life and be your own reality.

With Kevin Lucy and Ray McGovern in NYC in May 2015. Ray was career CIA, having served as George W. Bush’s personal briefer. He is my mentor. Kevin’s son Jeff was a Marine who killed himself upon returning home from Iraq. Kevin courageously and unselfishly shares his and his family’s story to strangers in order to help people heal.

Meeting with my Iraqi engineer staff in September of 2004. I know at least three of them have been killed and one maimed since I left. If they are still in Salah ad Din, they live in the battleground of the Sunni Islamic State and the Shia government/militias.

Watching the oil on the ancient Tigris River drift by in January 2005.

With Code Pink and Ray McGovern speaking against the US and NATO intervention in Libya. Spring 2011.

Yep. This is real. From the Green Zone in 2004.

My half of my trailer in Baghdad. 2004/5.

Afghan men and boys gawk at a Western woman walking through the streets of their city. Qalat, Zabul Province, Southern Afghanistan.

Election day is approaching in Qalat, Zabul Province in August, 2009. The elections were masterfully corrupt and illegitimate. It was truly brilliant and beautiful election theft. Too bad so many young American boys bled out obscenely so far from home to make that happen.

Becoming a war tax resister.

Two brothers killed by American bombs in Syria in 2014. It’s quite rare to see such testimony of our wars abroad in American media, but overseas, on networks not headquartered in New York City, viewers have a full appreciation for what the US is doing.

Speaking in Dallas in August 2011. I had promised myself this was to be my last speaking event, that I was going to leave the wars behind and start a new life. Staying with friends that night in Dallas I was unable to drink as I needed and I lay awake wracked with anxiety, anger and sorrow. The alcohol I traveled with I had finished, alone, in their guest room, the night before. The next day, on the flight home, I took advantage of a first class upgrade in order to drink the three hours back to DC. Arriving back home I met my parents and girlfriend for dinner. Strengthened by the alcohol I was confident and happy in my new life. It didn’t happen. The only thing I was successful in was leaving my work. Within months my relationship was over, breakdowns were daily and suicide was the next step. A therapist in DC saved my life.

Dinner in Qalat with the Ambassador. Summer 2009.

One of my D9 armored bull dozers at work in Iraq in 2006 or 2007. We used these to berm in cities and destroy homes. Please see: https://matthewhoh.com/2016/03/16/remembering-rachel-corrie-letters-from-palestine/

A village from the air north of Baghdad in June, 2004. We flew low and fast, which to the villagers was a loud and near constant reminder of our presence.

With Amos Lee, Raleigh, NC.

Speaking at a local Peace Action Dinner in 2013. Sober for a year I approached speaking selectively and with hesitation. At this point I was working for $7.35 at the YMCA, but I was alive.

A young girl in Qalat, Zabul Province Afghanistan. At her age she has only a few years remaining of being outside, not covered, and not escorted by a male relative. When she reaches puberty she will be shut away with the remainder of the female members of her family until she is married off to start a family of her own. If she is lucky she will be a first wife.

Debating Nate Fick of Generation Kill fame on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric in December 2009.

My first effort with my friend Danny Davis. We were rejected by about 15 newspapers before Defense News ran it. August 2010.

A statue of Salah ad Din was prominent on our base in Tikrit. Born in Tikrit in the 12th century, Salah ad Din would lead the Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187. As modern day crusaders most of us aboard the base were ignorant of such history and blind to the symbolism of the great general to the Iraqi, Arab and Muslim people.

Afghan villagers endure our speeches and await our paying a family for killing their sons.

My security team at an outdoor restaurant in Sulimania, Kurdistan. Sit outside, smoke cigs, talk to people and be nice. Heading to Kurdistan, with a stop first in Kirkuk, every six weeks was like R&R.

Checking on the status of road work in southeastern Afghanistan. Summer 2009.

Ashore in Thailand in 2001.That’s Thailand’s aircraft carrier behind me. I’d bet dollars to donuts she still hasn’t put out for operations yet. But, hey, Thai admirals get to say they have an aircraft carrier…

A simple plaque to remember the presence of United States Marines in Australia at the War Shrine in Melbourne, Australia.

Speaking in NJ. Winter 2011.

One of my meetings with local Afghans. Sometimes you would get someone representing the Taliban. Their message: we are tired of fighting, but we are not going to surrender. Surrender of course being the only thing I was authorized to communicate to them. Zabul Province, Afghanistan, September 2009.

The sandbags of the embassy compound in Baghdad. 2004/5

You know, things are often right outside your door that you don’t take the time to notice.

Boys and girls perform for Paul Bremer, CPA staff and Iraqi guests at the transitioning of the Ministry of Youth and Sport to Iraqi control. This was over eleven years ago. What happened to these children? What have they become if they have survived?

Due to my position, which really was seniority by default, because no one else showed up, I had my own bedroom with working bath. Here’s my toilet and bidet. I had a hot shower for half the year which was an unbelievable luxury compared to nearly everyone else in the country, soldier, insurgent or civilian (our hot water tank was located outside). Tikrit, Iraq, 2004/5

Sam Winstead, who fought at Peleliu and Okinawa in World War II, speaks at the Swords to Plowshares Memorial Bell Tower during Veterans Day observations in Raleigh, NC, 2014. Each year Sam rides his bike to Washington DC to speak for peace.

Day laborers I supervised one day on the grounds of the CPA compound. These men filled sandbags all day for 7 or 8 dollars a day (maybe a little more or less). I liked these men much more than I liked most of the CPA/Embassy staff. Interestingly, most of these men were Shia, however they spoke reverently of the Sunni uprising in Fallujah of April 04. Not many of us were talking to local people, or at least local people who were not on long term, well paying contracts.

Afghan war widows cleaning raisins. These were the only women allowed to work in the province. Summer 2009.

My first sergeant and I inspect a pipeline we ruptured in Barwahna, Iraq in November 2006. I still have that uniform with the oil stains.

Yes.

Just some guns my friends had in Baghdad…2004.

A view of Iraq from an open Humvee. This photo would have been from the Fall of 2004. A year and a half after the invasion we were still operating in vehicles open and exposed to enemy gunfire, rockets and IEDs, while welding our own armor onto the vehicles for protection.

That’s right.

These parakeets could be bought in the bazaar in the Green Zone, not more than a couple of blocks from the US Embassy. When suicide bombers hit the bazaar, one of them hit this store. I’ve always worried about what happened to these birds.

Che lives! On the border with Pakistan in southeastern Afghanistan a vendor sells Che Guervara stickers. I still have one. Summer 2009.

Reconstruction and governance team with PSD team leaders. Early 2005. Tikrit, Iraq.

Hugh Elsea’s wedding, Southwest Virginia near Lyhchburg, October 2012. This was the first event I ever attended as a sober person. Thankfully it was a dry wedding.

Yes, who would he torture?

One of my Huskies. You placed a Marine inside of this vehicle and he drove along the road with metal detectors under the vehicle. Its modular design allowed it to be blown to pieces without the Marine suffering visible wounds, usually. Of course, a minor design flaw was that the detector was behind the front wheels. My Marines drove these vehicles daily looking for bombs in and on the side of the roads. They never complained.

Building a better Iraq. Nothing like tempting people with the possibility of clean water for their children but then delivering a civil war onto them.

Attending the weekly Salah ad Din Provincial Council meeting in 2004 or 2005. The provincial council chairman (seated beneath the flag) would be killed not very long after I left Iraq. The man I am talking to is my friend, Khaled, the provincial head of construction, I have no idea if he is alive. In my suit pants pocket would have been my .32 Llama pistol.

The Tim Hortons at Kandahar Air Base in southern Afghanistan. This was not your grandfather’s or your father’s war. May 2009

Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength. -Saint Francis de Sales

A lone Iraqi soldier stands guard as we drive by. I wonder if he is alive. 2004 or 2005, Tikrit, Iraq.

From 2004 in Iraq. By the time I left Iraq, for the last time, in the spring of 2007 such destroyed and damaged buildings were common.

My Marines train to go to Iraq. 29 Palms, CA, summer 2006. We had a lot of trouble getting enough ammunition to train, among other problems, as we prepared to deploy. Officers senior to me lied about our shortages and it took the personal intervention of the 4th Marine Division Commanding General for us to get the ammunition, equipment and facilities to be properly trained for Iraq. Semper Fi and fuck you 4th CEB.

Young men, and some young women, saw this view every day for a year. Every day. Sometimes their mission would be broken up by the vehicle in front or behind getting blown up. Sometimes it was their vehicle. Other times they would take small arms or maybe RPG fire, and, of course, kids would throw rocks at them. They didn’t speak the local language, watched as local people fled the streets when they approached, didn’t know the local history, believed Iraq was involved in 9/11, received letters and emails telling them their girlfriends and wives were leaving them, used toilets that overflowed, slept in freezing AC to keep away the mosquitos and the disease the bugs carried, and ate shitty food, but they had each other.

Nothing seems like it can be so simple, so pure, so honest or so beautiful after war. All the stories, tales and narratives don’t make sense anymore.

The banner from my appearance with Jonathan Landay on one of Bill Moyers’ last shows. September 2014

My good friend Shea. Race car driver, blues guitarist and Quaker. Our friendship began the same time as my first attempt at sobriety.

New Years Day, 2005, Tikirt, Iraq. With Suzanne, State Department, and Gail, USAID. Two of my best friends. Behind the tree is a $10,000 copy machine that worked for about a week before the dust jammed it. It was impossible to fix without a technician and Ricoh wouldn’t send one to Iraq, I called.

My cat. My pets have allowed me to renew relationships of trust as well as maintain a connection to the present. Two things that PTSD takes away from you.

With Bradley Walker at the Marine Corps Marathon in 2008. Not pictured are Brad’s two artificial legs. Brad lost his legs when the vehicle he was in hit an IED in December 2006. My vehicle had driven over that IED just seconds before Brad’s did.

Find it.

An example of a self-armored vehicle that we rode in until late in 2004. This wasn’t a vehicle I ever rode in, but it was similar to one I often rode in in Salah ad Din Province. Baghdad, Spring or Summer 2004.

In a new apartment, I conduct a Skype interview with BBC from my bedroom. Don’t let anyone tell you being an anti-war agitator is a path to financial prosperity ;) October 2013

My latest tattoo. From the Rumi poem Bewilderment, in Farsi, it reads: “I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad.”

Working for six dollars a day these young men made us look very good to the staff of the US embassy and to the politicians in Washington, DC. Progress was being made, we can attest to it because we are spending money…

Speaking against torture outside the governor’s mansion in Raleigh in 2014. North Carolina is home to an airfield utilized in the US government’s rendition and torture program. While clearly illegal, under existing local, state and federal laws, no elected or appointed official has had the courage, or political need, to enforce the law.

Afghan soldiers prepare to be inspected by the governor of Zabul Province. None of these soldiers were from the province, very few spoke Pashto and even less were Pashtun. August 2009

Young Iraqi men. How long did those smiles last after 2004?

Mona and Risahla. Mona was Shia, Risahla Kurdish. Mona treated me, every day, like her son for nearly a year. I have no idea if she is alive.

Downtown Hit, Iraq. One of the oldest cities it was a very, very tough place for the Marines and Soldiers stationed here. In every window there could be a sniper, every piece of trash could be an IED, and every person might be a suicide bomber. I have the greatest respect for our young men who lived here, for months on end, enduring that insanity. It is right to be angry at what we put them through.

Greeting Ambassador Karl Eikenberry alongside the Commander of 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division. At this point I was the acting political officer for four provinces in northeastern Afghanistan. Spring 2009.

Parliament, Westminster and MI5 from RT’s London studio. November 2014.

My pills and my dog’s pills. We are quite the pair.

Combat wasn’t the only danger in Iraq. Accidents accounted for many, many American and Iraqi lives. While this incident was nothing more than a gigantic pain in the ass, such rollovers and submersions could be deadly. Heavy vehicles would collapse the farm roads, rolling over into a water filled ditched. The vehicle would sink into the mud. Encased, unable to open the vehicle doors and hatches, the crew would slowly drown to death. The other members of the patrol would be unable to dig out the vehicle and would have to wait helplessly for a recovery team while their mates died.

Our deck in Tikrit. We could eat from the date palms. Fortunately you could usually hear the outgoing fire from insurgent mortars before the rounds reached the base giving us enough time to get back inside. I will say watching incoming mortar rounds fall short and detonate on the Tigris was a bit thrilling.

My favorite dog we worked with in Anbar Province in 2006 and 2007. This was Cisco. He was very sweet and would climb in your lap. He was trained for both bomb detection and attack and was on at least his third deployment. Like many of our war dogs he suffered from PTSD. His teeth had been replaced with titanium. When a dog sinks into an arm or leg they will bite into the bone and not release. Regular teeth may break, titanium won’t. To know what we have done to these creatures in pursuit of our wars is to know what war is.

Flying to Baghdad in 2004/5. This was often very cold and loud, or very hot and loud, but much, much safer than driving back and forth on Route Tampa.

Oil floods the Tigris River in January 2005. This became more common as the year went on.

Speaking in defense of Bowe Bergdahl’s family on CNN, 2014.

Iraqi men play soccer on a pitch in Sadr City, Baghdad, May 2004.

Live in the present. It may not be Maui at Christmas, but find yourself in the present wherever you are. You owe that to those who can no longer do so themselves.

Testing suicide bomber detection devices on a very cold day in Massachusetts in January 2009. They didn’t work. That didn’t stop the vendors from complaining to Congress though.

Speaking to members of Congress in July 2010. Bob Pape of the University of Chicago is beside me.

The Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra. Revered in Shia society, al Qaeda would destroy its beautiful dome in February 2006. The civil war between Iraqis had begun well before al-Qaeda’s attack, so much that we began recording and reporting to Baghdad Iraqi civilian deaths in early 2005. That we didn’t do so for nearly two years into our war there tells a lot about us. In October 2004, Iraqi and American special operations troops stormed the mosque to root out insurgents. In doing so they destroyed the front door. We, the US, paid $100,000 to purchase a replacement. War is racket folks…

I’m on the left heading to inspect one of the berms we had built outside of Haqlaniyah, Anbar Province, Iraq, December 2006. As part of a larger campaign, Marines, Soldiers and Sailors, with Iraqi police and army units, led by Sunnis, and blessed off by local tribal leaders, began to clear the cities of the Euphrates River Valley leading to Ramadi. We constructed large berms around the cities, allowing only one way in and out. Marines and Iraqi soldiers went house to house and cleared the city. Local people gave up the al-Qaeda cells that were operating in their cities. They did that, not because they liked us, but because we had finally talked to and worked with their local leaders and limited the interference from the Shia government in Baghdad. We replaced the Shia leaders of Iraqi soldiers and police with Sunnis and Anbaris. With no need for al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) the Sunnis gave them up. What was fascinating was that the AQI cells were quite small. Violence dropped dramatically. It became so quiet it was scary. In the end it was politics that had them fighting us, simple, easy to understand grievances that our hubris, ignorance and arrogance would not previously let us consider.

One of my 7-ton trucks post IED strike. My three Marines walked away from this, but were never tested for traumatic brain injury upon returning home to the US. Upon getting home we did receive a one hour PTSD briefing from a kind person who had never been to war. We didn’t give it much mind. 2007

Ashore in Indonesia less than 20 kilometers from the equator in 2001.

Doing local news in Raleigh, NC. Local news allows you to reach audiences you wouldn’t ordinarily reach.

My Kurdish colleague’s family would host us. Here is a spread Karzan’s mom and sister made for me and my security team.

Those left behind. I was in Melbourne, Australia in 2012 to keynote an Australian national security conference. My talk to a couple hundred people was roughly well received by half those at the conference center in the Melbourne Cricket Stadium. The others, primarily from senior government, the defense industry, and those looking to join the defense industry or senior government was not so receptive. Simply put, my talk proffered the question: why is Australia jumping into the quicksand of Afghanistan (at this time the Australians were replacing the Dutch in Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan).

My girl Sky. Please consider helping veterans by donating to any of the many organizations that pair veterans with rescued dogs.

An M1 Abrams crew in Salah Ad Din Province in October 2004. Note the green paint on the tank. A year and a half into the war and we still didn’t have equipment that was even the right color… During my second deployment, as a Marine, I came to greatly value the firepower of a tank.

My parents’ home in NC. As a 40 year old man I spent a year at their home, recovering and trying to get sober, completely broke and unable to work. I am lucky to have such a family, other guys aren’t. Without them I would have had to live in my car and I doubt I’d still be here today.

Sunni boys come running as we drive past. They always came running. It would scare the hell out of you because we were always capable of being attacked or hitting an IED. My stomach sinks now as my body and mind remember kids like this running towards us and being so afraid, so afraid, they would be killed.

Speaking with a local municipality engineer during post combat operations in either Samarra or Bayji, Fall 2004. I have no excuse for the sideburns. It was a tough time for us all…

An early appearance on CNN in November 2009. Prior to this my last appearance in the American press was in the Hunterdon County Democrat in 1991 for high school track.

I doubt that flag is still there.

For a long time I lost my pride in what I did as a Marine, of how my Marines behaved and performed. Through therapy I have come to put my emotions, memories and feeling in perspective, to understand what we did and how we acted, how we tried to be as moral as possible in an immoral position. I have the greatest respect and fondest memories of the majority of Marines I served with, particularly those I led. Our nation’s sins should not be ours to bear alone in our own mindful hate, anger, despair and sorrow.

FOB Danger, Tikrit, Iraq. In the hill on the left of the photo, beneath the minaret, were millennia old living spaces and caves, including an ancient pre-Mohamdian church. On the right, across the bridge, was a zoo the Baath Party had run for the wealthy and the privileged. Twice, on our patio, at night, I saw the lynx that was once caged in that zoo. This was an odd place.

Talking to peace people in NC.

In 2004 I sit next to a gentlemen who would be killed just a few days later. HIs funeral would be attacked and bombed, slaughtering family and friends mourning a good man, which he was, he was one of the few. Years later my own government would attack funerals with drones and airstrikes.

Second Lieutenant Hoh, 1998.

Stockholm, March 2011. The last day of a 17 day speaking tour through Denmark, Finland, Holland and Sweden.

A Marine gets ready for patrol. Anbar Province, Winter 2007.

A message supporting diplomacy with Iran from Spring 2015.

A view of the pool at CPA Headquarters/American embassy. Spring or Summer 2004.

A co-worker attracts attention while supervising day laborers on the CPA grounds. Spring 2004. Green Zone, Baghdad. Our women got lots of attention from local men not used to form flattering clothing.

Atop the Al Malawiya Shrine in Samarra. April 2005.

The view from a lavender farm, Maui, March 2015.

Boys in Sadr City, Iraq, Spring 2004. By the time our occupation ended, seven years later, many of these boys would, if they had survived, been part of the Mahdi Army. Note the open top Hummvee at the top of the photo.

A Marine hoists our colors over Um Qasr, Iraq the first day of the invasion in March 2003. I am seeing this from my desk at the Pentagon, upset I wasn’t taking part, afraid I was going to miss the war.

A cold and frozen day in NC in 2013. I look at this now and I see old sentiments about country, people and values frozen and dead in my own heart. Still there, still resident, but frozen and dead.

In Oslo, November 2014 with my very brave friends and heroes: John Johns, Colleen Rowley, Kirk Wiebe and Normon Solomon.

On the Pakistan border a local man tells us he has no need for any of us.

I can feel the heat, I can taste the dust, I can feel my shirt and my pants sticking to me from the sweat, I am cognizant of needing to keep drinking water and forcing myself to eat. I keep an eye on not getting ahead of my security and I have a body guard right near me. I search every Iraqi with my eyes and I wait for the sound of AK fire, the retort of an outgoing mortar, or the shock and blast of a suicide bomber. I’d rather die than lose my eyes or my balls, and I’d rather die than any of my friends around me. Sitting in Wake Forest, NC on November 19, 2015, those feelings are as genuine as they were over 11 years ago in Bayji, Iraq.

Beautiful American women visited us from time to time to tell us they were proud of us.

Camp Fuji, Japan, Winter 2001. Within the year al-Qaeda would let the US know the world had changed.

With Jesse Ventura on his television show in early 2015. I have appeared on a couple of occasions with Governor Ventura and each time I get many, many more views and comments than I do from traditional cable news media.

Downtown Qalat. A provincial capital, Qalat set on the main highway between Afghanistan’s two major highways. 14 years after the war began that highway is still not controlled by Afghan government forces. August 2009

Speaking with Chris Hayes on MSNBC the night the US launched strikes agains the Islamic State in 2014. A year later the Islamic State is only larger, stronger, and has a global presence throughout the Muslim world. In the past two weeks they have successfully inspired the mass bombings in Beirut, attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian airliner.

Everyone of us behaved like a tourist at some point. I always thought of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMFLZuAen0k

Destruction was all around us, including the buildings you lived next to. But, I guess, you become numb or you explain it away. This building had been hit by cruise missiles and airstrikes in 2003.

We couldn’t get bulletproof glass for our guard towers, equipment to repair our jammers to protect us from IEDs, or even cold weather gear that would not catch fire if our vehicles were hit, but we sure had a lot of candy! Charlie Company, 4th Combat Engineer Battalion, Regimental Combat Team 7, Anbar Province, 2006.

The joy I felt when I took off this bracelet upon Bowe’s release was nothing compared to the revulsion at the base and petty politically motivated hatred of Americans towards Bowe and his family.

Why every American wanted to visit Kurdistan.

A palace on FOB Danger. My home for nearly a year in 2004-5.

In northern Iraq, in Sulamania, a Kurdish city and province, we could drop our body armor and rifles, and walk the streets. Among the Kurds we were seen as liberators.

Dave and Majeed. Baghdad, 2004. Majeed and his family were fortunate to have been accepted into the asylum program in the US. A civil engineer, he now drives a truck.

Raleigh NC Town Hall w/ 3 US congressional reps and 2 state reps. Betsy Crites of NC Peace Action on the right. February 2012. I was newly sober.

My friend Sean delivers the flag to his father at Sean’s brother’s funeral.

With Tomi Lauren of the One America News Network, a network created because Fox News isn’t conservative enough…Go and speak to all.

Near daily view in 2004 and 2005 as we leave the FOB.

Palace living in Baghdad.

NYU Public Theater December 2010 with Alec Baldwin and fellow veterans.

At the infamous Green Zone Disco. It was as I would imagine a disco would have been like at a Howard Johnson’s in the late 1970s. Spring 2004.

They will be here long after we leave. Learn from them.

Speaking with Ammar and Damar in Tikrit shortly before leaving Tirkit to head home to the US after a year in Iraq. Upon returning home I would work as a consultant for the State Department on Iraq policy. Within a few months of being at the State Department, I had volunteered for mobilization with the Marine Corps.

Ladies and gentlemen, Consumerism has arrived in Baghdad. Please visit the al-Rasheed to shop and get the first tastes of a gloriously provisioned Iraq.

Brian, one of our Army Corps of Engineers civilians with some cash from one of my safes. Tikrit, Iraq, 2004/5

Afghan men and soldiers dance at an Afghan Independence Day celebration. The holiday commemorated defeating the British (multiple times) and the Soviets. My British colleagues were a bit unnerved by some of the referencing to killing Brits in their speeches and songs. Note the photo of Ahmed Shah Massoud in the top left corner of the photo. The ANA truly stood for the Army of the Northern Alliance.

With my friend Leslie Cockburn at her book launch in Fall 2013. Leslie’s novel, Baghdad Solitaire, is a vivid depiction of life in Iraq under occupation. So vivid I had to stop reading it for awhile.

Without makeup on MSNBC.

Your heart might be black and dead, that’s why you need to take something into your heart to help it heal. These two do it for me.

John Fields one of my PSD team leaders outside Samarra, April 2005. A Brit and a very, very good man.

In Crystal City, Virginia, 2008/9, at the Joint IED Defeat Organization, with former Marines and soldiers, engineers, and scientists to find technologies to detect suicide bombers and IEDs buried in the ground.

A young girl watches us walk by. If she is alive, she is now a young woman, having survived a war that has seen a million dead, millions wounded and maimed, millions displaced and nearly everyone mentally and emotionally traumatized. If she is still living in that house she is either under Islamic State oppression or subject to the abuses of Shia militias.

On my wall, and maybe, at some point, on my forearm.

Sitting alongside NSA whistleblower Tom Drake at the National Press Club in Washington, DC in 2013.

With one of my PSD teams above Sulimania, Kurdistan, Iraq.

Needless to say I root for the apes in the Planet of the Apes movies…

Men under my employ and pay work in Salah ad Din province in 2004. I ran a program with money from the Development Fund for Iraq, money that came from seized Iraqi assets, oil revenue and the UN oil for food program. The program was $50 million dollars and I received no written instructions as to its operation. When we needed more cash we would fly down to Baghdad and fill a duffel bag, or two, with cash from the vault. You can get $6 million dollars in a standard military duffel/sea bag. We would then fly back to Tikrit and put the money in two safes I kept in my bedroom. We would pay our contractors directly, while involving the local Iraqi government and ministries. Because we had no written instructions the program was fungible and we utilized the cash to employ public servants and conduct emergency post-battle reconstruction. I provided copies of my records to both contracting and financing officers in Kirkuk and Baghdad, as well as kept hard and digital copies in Tikrit I actually received special recognition for our work by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. It didn’t matter, we didn’t understand the politics of the war or the reality of being occupiers. And, of course, all the records were mysteriously lost as time went on. War is a racket.

Two of my NCOs grill for their Marines in between missions and patrols. I was blessed, company wide, with tough, smart and dependable corporals and sergeants. They kept their Marines alive. Rahwah, Anbar Province, Iraq, 2006/7

As the year went on we needed to add more blast protection to our house. Tikrit, Iraq, 2005

Ashore in Jakarta with Indonesian Marines in 2001.

Kurdistan. History matters.

With Andy, one of my platoon commanders. Haditha, Iraq, December 2006.

Saint Patrick’s Day 2010. I would wake up on my floor the next day, clean my self up and go and brief the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Ike Skelton. After briefing him, Chairman Skelton told me I was the first person to have ever come into his office and tell him things weren’t going well in Afghanistan. This was 2010.

My friend Dave stands next to one of the structurally decapitated heads of Saddam Hussein. Baghdad, Spring 2004.

When your mom has a crush on Chris Coumo you give him a hug and get a photo. Summer 2014

Off they go. They will arrive in a village with their guns and maybe some money, and then they will leave. They will do this for an entire deployment. Lagham Province, Afghanistan, 2009

There is a lot to fight for at home. There is really no reason to go abroad looking for monsters. We have too many here.

Mazin. Spring 2005. I still have the prayer beads you gave me my friend.

Members of the Ministry of Youth and Sport in Baghdad May 2004. Nada was one of our Iraqi employees. As I understand she is safe in the United States. Worrying what became of her haunted me for years. The gentleman to my right, Dave, was an executive with Nike who volunteered his time from home and family to try and do something good in Iraq. The gentleman to Nada’s left, Lynn, was an Army chaplain. A kinder, wiser and more gentle man I’m not sure I ever knew. RIP Lynn.

Speaking at the venerable Cleveland Club in the summer of 2011. I’m sweating out last night’s booze, beginning to feel needy for alcohol, and calculating how soon I can be at the airport in order to maximize time in the bar.

My favorite statue in Washington DC. Think big thoughts but remember it all may be absurd.

A joint Iraqi-US reconstruction team meeting. Anyone who tells you we weren’t doing counter-insurgency prior to General Petraeus’ assumption of command in Iraq in 2007 simply doesn’t know what they are talking about. Here we were utilizing millions and millions of dollars in American resources and money in collaboration with Iraq institutions, norms and personnel. Yet, every week, the insurgency grew stronger. A well financed and charitable occupation is still an occupation.

T walls and concertina lined the roads in the Green Zone (GZ). I was first stationed in Baghdad in spring 2004 before moving north to Tikrit, but I returned to the embassy roughly every 6 weeks. Each time I returned to the GZ more fortifications, barricades and obstacles had been constructed. Yet, inside the Embassy, assessments of Iraq were rosy…

Viva La Papa.

Always nice when one of your former Marines, who had a rough go of it on several occasions in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has a child. Semper Fidelis Ethan.

Laborers employed under my public works program. Monthly I would disperse tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to Iraqi communities in Salah ad Din Province to maintain public services. At its peak I had 3,000 employees. Sure, plenty of it got stolen, but the work did get done and it was done transparently and through the Iraqi ministries and local governments. The insurgency still blossomed bloodily.

Boys watch a grader at work in a town in Salah ad Din Province, Iraq. These boys are all fighting age now.

Marrying Bryce and Casey. May 2011.

With First Sergeant Scott Miller in a makeshift company headquarters in Haditha, Iraq, Fall/Winter 2006. No better friend, no better counsel than 1stSgt Miller. Semper Fidelis Scott.

Speaking with Lauren Lyster of RT News. I would not drink before doing media, but would almost always spend the rest of the afternoon and evening making friends with the pain in my head via alcohol. Washington, DC. Summer, 2010

Through the end of 2004 until I left Tikrit at the end of May 2005, smoke clouds from the oil fires of Bayji were near daily.

My first and, only, boss, Chuck, in Tirkit, posing in front of an armored Humvee on FOB Danger. The rumor was that that vehicle had belonged to Michael Jackson. I don’t know if that is true, but what is true is that the US government and its allies were incredibly unprepared for the war in Iraq. Over a year of believing it would get better in Iraq by politicians, bureaucrats and generals finally evaporated and in 2004 the US government purchased and requisitioned armored vehicles across the world to protect its people in Iraq. If I recall right this vehicle was delivered without the keys. Eventually KBR came and took it away.

With the incomparable Ray McGovern and two very bad ass ladies from Code Pink, Asheville, NC, July 2014.

My home and office. FOB Danger, Tikrit, Iraq, 2004-5.

With Daniel Ellsberg in LA. November 2009.

My friend’s patio in Maui. The kindness of friends has saved me.

RIP Danny.

Speaking as an alum at Tufts University, April 2011.

An aerial view of the Presidential palace in the Baghdad. It would serve as headquarters for the US Coalition Provisional Authority and then the US Embassy in Iraq.

Our house staff in Tikrit, Iraq. Mostly Shia and Kurds, what happened to them, particularly the women, haunts me and is a root cause of my PTSD and moral injury.

A young Iraqi digs a ditch in Salah ad Din province in 2004 or 2005.

Visiting Julian Assange in London in November 2014.

First Lieutenant Hoh with North Korea behind him in the winter of 2001.

Speaking at the Carr Center at Harvard University in November 2010. Yeah, that fish I caught was that big…

A market we drove by. We rarely, if ever, stopped at such places, none of us wanted to kill their business by scaring away the customers. Also, it wasn’t very safe for us.

A visit from an American and British delegation from Kabul. Qalat, Zabul Province, Southeastern Afghanistan, Summer 2009.

Meticulously researched and documented. One of the first books I suggest to anyone who is looking to understand the wars we are in.

Heading through a checkpoint in 2004.

Iraqi police move past us in October 2004. Riding 7 or 8 to an unarmored pick up truck these men were easily killed by insurgents. By 2005 the insurgents had begun placing canisters of fuel on the IEDs to create a fire ball to burn those hit in open vehicles and to scare those in the vicinity.

A medevac following a successful IED attack against American forces in between Tikrit and Kirkuk, 2005.

My favorite interview. From the Spanish newspaper La Pais. In it the correspondent refers to me as burly and affable. We did the interview in one of my local bars, I’m pretty sure the correspondent kindly substituted burly and affable for fat and drunk.

Steel from the World Trade Center at my father’s old church, the Church of the Good Shepard in Inman, Manhattan, January 2013.

Welcome to Samarra. October, 2004.

With my friend, General Abdullah. He wouldn’t wear the glasses because he didn’t want his enemies to see him in them. His enemies executed him in April 2011.

Iraqi kids giving us thumbs up and hoping for candy as we drive to Baquba. I’m not sure if these were Sunni or Shia children, but regardless, I can’t imagine they would be so friendly today.

What it looks like when some foreign ambassadors and generals visit your city. October 2004

Bryan and I with our largest single pay day. $3.3 million dollars. I was 31 years old, a Department of Defense civilian employee and a captain in the US Marine Corps Inactive Reserve.

We believed that if we showed progress to the Iraqi people, that if we delivered services, got the government working again, made their communities nicer and modern, that the people, including tribal leaders, would forget the occupation, acquiesce to usurpation, allow traditional rivals to profit, forgive our atrocities and mistakes, and not respond to the fear brought by jihadists. We were fools.

With Contessa Brewer on MSNBC in December 2010.

What it looks like when a rocket strikes next to your office. Our office was the second window on the left, close to the impact point. No one was hurt. I was eating downstairs in the chow hall, but Rita, our Christian-Iraqi secretary was in the office at the time. Whoever applied the mylar coating that prevented the window from becoming shrapnel saved Rita’s life. Baghdad, May 2004.

At Jalalabad Airbase in northeastern Afghanistan, Spring 2009. An old Soviet warplane lays broken, placed upon American HESCO, while nearby are the steps where Osama bin Laden announced his arrival in Afghanistan and declared continued war against the US. Bin Laden made that statement several months before the Taliban conquered this area; the Taliban effectively inherited bin Laden. Meanwhile, the man who actually brought bin Laden to Afghanistan, Abdul Rasoul Sayaf is today a prominent member of the Afghan Parliament who has run as a candidate for President. He actually won Kandahar Province in voting in 2014.

Damn right Snoopy.

It reads, in English letters over the Arabic, of course: “The United States Army in partnership with the Iraqi people for a better future.” I don’t believe that sign is still standing…

Pay day in Tikrit. We worked in cash. Things did get built and the money bought influence, but building things does not bring justice and influence is not loyalty. The insurgency got stronger. Note the black plastic bag, most of our contractors would walk out the gate of FOB Danger into Tikrit, with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in those black plastic bags, nearly the same time, every week. I never heard once of one of them getting robbed…

Christmas morning, 2004. General Abdullah, the deputy governor, and Sheik Naji, the Tribal Council leader, brought us the tree. They are both dead.

At the Marine Corps Ball with my company staff after my second Iraq Deployment. Finer men I’ve never known.

Speaking with my operations chief, Master Sergeant Kent Samuels, the best Marine I ever served with, on a clear and beautiful December day in Iraq. Two of my Marines would be severely wounded just hours after this photo.

The hardest thing of war: trying to be moral in the immoral world of war.

With my friend, hero and inspiration, Shea Brown at the 2013 Ridenhour Awards.

Afghan men greet us as we approach a school. Zabul Province, Afghanistan.

Two of my best friends to this day. Suzanne and Ryan. FOB Danger, Tikirt, Iraq, December 2004.

My friend Erica running the Marine Corps Marathon in 2008 with the name of my radio operator on her back.

While the rest of Iraq burned we had a pretty excellent pool party at CPA headquarters in Baghdad. Memorial Day, 2004.

A Bradley stands guard at one of our gates. I once saw an insurgent RPG team attack a Bradley at a checkpoint in daylight. The Bradely’s coaxial machine gun killed them very quickly. I watched it happen with a cup of coffee in my hand.

As a guest at a Bahai summer retreat in FL in July 2015. Although I am an atheist 6 1/2 days of the week it doesn’t mean I stop exploring, stop questioning, stop seeking and stop trying to understand. Isn’t that photo dramatic? ;)

Letting go is not forgetting.

Staff Sergeant Lange briefs his Marines before a patrol to find IEDs on a cold winter day in Haditha, Iraq. I love everyone of those kids. 2006

Getting ready to fly out. I was involved in a deadly helicopter crash in 2006, after that, whenever I flew, I was always one of the last to board and first to get off. Zabul Province, Afghanistan, Summer 2009.

With Karzan at a meeting of generals and governors in Sulimania, Kurdistan, Iraq, April 2005. Note the photo of Talabani and the Kurdish flag.

Gus. RIP my friend.

One of my tattoos. Originally the design was something my friend and engineer in Iraq, Ammar, and I came up with. Based on the idea, in 2004, that we were rebuilding the country. For my tattoo, a decade later, I replaced one of the shovels with an ax and added a drop of blood. It’s more honest that way.

My good friend’s brother’s grave in Arlington.

Teaching soldiers and civilians how we were doing governance and reconstruction operations in 1st Infantry Division’s AO in 2004. We were a model of success for the rest of Iraq, but the success was only on paper. Sure we built and repaired a lot, some of it competently (almost always when we worked through the Iraqi ministry and not Western contractors), but as we spent millions of dollars per week, worked to ensure elections would occur and to create an Iraqi government, the insurgency gained in strength every week.

Share this please.

We drive past a lone Iraqi policeman at his checkpoint. When an Iraqi police man or soldier was posted in the middle of the road, by themselves, we would refer to those positions as suicide posts. Here the Iraqi policeman is not wearing a mask or baclava indicating the area was somewhat controlled and sympathetic to Iraqi government and coalition forces.

Two Iraqi women walk along the Euphrates River in Anbar Province in 2006 or 2007. For most of our time in Anbar this was as close as many civilians would come to us.

Throughout the wars it was forbidden to have an American flag on our vehicles. The reason: because it would make the local people feel occupied. As if that heavy machine gun wasn’t enough to make them feel occupied…

Bradleys and a concrete box to hide in from mortar and rocket fire near the ancient Malawiya temple in Samara.

I wrote a short post on this photo earlier this year: https://matthewhoh.com/2015/02/27/smoke-from-bayji/

In Kunar Province in northeastern Afghanistan a US army captain explains the area to me. Spring 2009. At this point, the US Army was spending $100 million on construction and development projects in this part of the country (the four provinces of Nangahar, Nuristan, Kunar and Laghman, known collectively as N2KL), while USAID was spending an additional $100 million. There was nearly zero coordination between the the two organizations, although representatives on the ground did try and work through issues on a personal level. However, at regional command, Jalalabad, where there was no USAID presence, national command, Kabul, and strategic command, Washington, DC, there was no cooperation between these two organizations that were spending hundreds of millions of taxpayers dollars in this region and billions nationally. The lack of results was to be expected, not just in achieving success on the project level, but success in terms of winning the war. By the way, the fact that I am wearing a blazer, khaki pants and drinking a Sprite, while she has two weapons, is not lost on me.

The Australians remember that war destroys not just the bodies and soul of men, but animals as well. Bless the Australians for such a remembrance. Melbourne, Australia, 2012.

Sadr City in the spring of 2004. Well over a year after our occupation had begun this was the reality of the streets of Baghdad. A reality very distant from the conversations at the Embassy and in Washington.

I can go on for a very long time about Batman. A man challenged by his own society who destroys all around him in a quest for justice and vengeance, slaughtering his soul in a Sisyphean task of trying to reform the past and atone for his own inaction and culpability. Batman, like our desire for a just world, accountability and vengeance, is a heartbreaking tale of self destruction. At its worst it will manifest as a tragic self-immolation of our lives, our minds and our souls, and those belonging to our friends and family, at best it is Adam West riding a miniature elephant.

Don’t ever say our occupation wasn’t classy….

Paying villagers in Zabul Province, Afghanistan for the death of villagers by our Apache helicopters. August 2009. I’m standing, in the blue shirt.

Orange soda and snacks.

A market in Sadr City in either 2004 or 2005.

By all means, let’s make sure we have clean water to swim in. The Iraqis can wait. Also, why won’t the Iraqis just learn English already??? Green Zone, Baghdad, Spring 2004.

Contractors inside the Horsegate, September, 2004, Tikrit, Iraq. They are waiting to be paid, in cash, in amounts varying between a few thousand dollars and millions. This occurred weekly.

Tacos and the beach. Do things like this. Live, try and live, it’s all you can do. You know too many who can’t even do that anymore.

Prior to the Marines’ assault on Fallujah in November 2004, we conducted a campaign against Samarra in October. A shaping operation, the intent was to disrupt insurgent networks prior to the battle in Fallujah, while denying sanctuary to insurgents who would attempt to escape Fallujah. Here a column of fuel tankers awaits entry into Samarra. We did a massive Phase IV post combat reconstruction effort in Samarra intended to connect the local people to their government and convince to support us and not the insurgents. It didn’t work.

My friend Bryan with the Golden Dome mosque of Samarra behind him. Al-Qaeda would destroy the mosque, an important Shia pilgrimage and heritage site, in February 2006.

The 1st Infantry Division Headquarters in Tikrit, Iraq. Named FOB Danger, we were housed in an extremely large compound built by the Baath Party in Tikrit, Iraq. With dozens of palaces and villas, manmade lakes and waterfalls, and a zoo, it was an absurdist realization of a fever dream combining Disneyworld, Las Vegas, and the sets of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra. The division headquarters, pictured here, was located on the cliff overlooking the Tirgis River where, according to legend, the great Muslim general Salahaddin was born. By the time I left we had a trailer selling Subway sandwiches, a coffee shop where Bangladeshi workers would make you a cappuccino and Zumba classes.

Hello from Oslo. November 2014. Working with fellow activists, many of them courageous and lawbreaking whistleblowers, from four other countries.

We often need to be refreshed. Rumi. 13th century.

My friend Durga. Baghdad 2004. We became friends after I let him use my computer to email his family back in Nepal. Kindness has its rewards. Durga was the Nepalese guard company quarter master. I never suffered without whenever I was in Baghdad after that.

Love and joy. Lost through war and PTSD, renewed through dogs.

I have a fantasy, I have always had it, of walking cross country. With PTSD it becomes a fantasy of escape, and, every now and again, I contemplate it. But I know it is just a means for me to try to run, to try to avoid and that, at some point, it would have to end. When does it end?

The Horsegate, Forward Operating Base Danger, Tikrit, Iraq. 2004/5 Supposedly Saddam’s carriage, pulled by the most beauteous white horses would enter and leave through here. I taught my friend Mazin how to drive in that parking lot.

On the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan in the summer of 2009. Honestly, I might even have been in Pakistan.

JFK memorial in Melbourne, Australia. It’s nice to be overseas and see a monument to the United States representative of something other than fast food.

Bob Herbert’s column of July 9, 2009 had a very deep effect on me when I read it in Zabul Province, Afghanistan that summer. It was an honor to be included in his book.

Afghan elders await a session with Americans and Afghans from Kabul to begin in the summer of 2009. Zabul Province, Afghanistan.

Speaking at the dedication of the Expose Facts’ Daniel Ellsberg billboard outside the US State Department in May 2014.

Young boys and girls in a school in Salah ad Din province in Iraq in 2004 or 2005. Sunni kids. How many are fighting for the Islamic State now?

Iraqi boys wave for the cameras. Taken over a decade ago these boys are young men now. If they have survived, if they are not refugees…I wonder about them. These were Sunni boys. Do they fight for the Islamic State? Most assuredly I believe they do. Our simple and chauvanistic tales and narratives of Manichean sides of good and evil do not withstand such knowledge of the Islamic State’s fighters as joyful youths. These boys weren’t made evil by their people, their faith, their culture, but rather by over a decade of war, suffering, hate, desperation and fear.

With Jess Radack, Tom Drake and Peter van Buren at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. If you don’t know who these folks are, how brave they are and how they have taken on the worst in our government, please google them.

As CPA transitioned to the US Embassy in the spring of 2004 I went north from Baghdad to Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s home city. Incoming (civilian) and outgoing (mostly military) members of the reconstruction and governance team in Salah ad Din province.

Somewhere some poor bastard has it worse than you. A Marine burns shit in Haditha, Iraq, December 2006.

As a member of the Secretary of the Navy’s office in the summer of 2003.

How I traveled. An armored Land Crusier, my cup of coffee and my trusty AK-47. I’d wear body armor, and if wearing a suit, would put my jacket over the body armor. I’d rarely wear a helmet and I would often have a small pistol in my front right pants pocket with an extra magazine in my left pocket. Sometimes, but not always, I’d have a bag of cash. My program was $50 million dollars. The most I ever had in my possession at one time was $26 million which I kept in my bedroom in two safes.

Dogs in Russia. The basic elements of life, including compassion and suffering, are not restricted by geographical borders or species.

Conducting post combat reconstruction operations in Samarra, October 2004. I had several hundred thousands of dollars in cash, plus several million dollars in contracts to award and restart. The army partnered with the Iraqi ministries to rebuild and renew services to the people. It was classic COIN and it didn’t work. This was over two years prior to General Petraeus and his COINdinistas arriving in Iraq to “win” the war. General Petraeus was in Iraq at this point, leading a failed effort to train Iraqi security forces, allowing open sectarian dominance in those security forces, and losing hundreds of thousands of weapons and millions of pounds of ammunition; all while penning op-eds for the Washington Post, informing Americans how well the war was going in Iraq and not so subtly encouraging them to vote Bush-Cheney in 04.

Tora Bora seen from Jalalabad Airfield in Spring 2005, Northeastern Afghanistan. These were the mountains that bin Laden and his few remaining allies escaped to in 2001. From here he escaped into Pakistan. When I took this photo in 2009 I thought what would have happened if we had got bin Laden in 2001. If we had captured or killed him in those mountains. How different would history be, how different our lives, how many lives would not be devolving in the ground, how many dreams and promises to love ones would have been kept? Over four years after killing bin Laden our wars continue. The same would have occurred in 2001. We were a nation bent on war and once entered into war, by petty men and women devoid of worldly, historical, cultural and religious knowledge, but conditioned to obey the campaign dollars and the public opinion polls., We always surrender our options and free will to the gods of war. The Romans and the Greeks named forces outside of human control as gods. Chief among the gods were Mars (Rome) and Ares (Greece). Such a god still exists as war, a force beyond human manipulation, control or understanding. Ask the dead in Paris, Beirut, the Sinai, Raqaa, Baghdad and Kabul if they disagree.

As if out of central casting, an Afghan village elder hears our latest take on a war he has lived through since the 1970s. Zabul Province, August 2009

Memorial Day party at CPA headquarters, Baghdad, Iraq, May 2004. I had been in Iraq for a few weeks at this point. While Baghdad was hit daily with car bombs we drank Amstel Light.

It’s hard to forget such a face. And with remembering comes wondering.

One of the many palaces and villas built by the Baath Party in Tikrit, Iraq.

A guard stirs the tea he made for me with the cleaning rod from his rifle. Qalat, Zabul Province, Southern Afghanistan, May 2009

My movement from Baghdad to Tikrit in June 2004.

DVDs, all pirated, and some of them porn. As the car bombs were rocking Baghdad and Sunni and Shia uprisings were shaking nearly every city, in spring 2004 I heard CPA senior advisors at a meeting discuss the prevalence of pirated DVDs and the need to respect the interests of Jack Valenti and the motion picture industry. I’m serious. Jerry Bremer could have been Moses, Abe Lincoln and Gandhi rolled into one and he still would have been a failure in Baghdad because of those who populated the CPA.

With my good friend Pete Dominick. Pete I hope you know how much your friendship means to me.

Young Shia boys gather outside their homes in Sadr City, Baghdad in 2004 or 2005. By now these boys are old enough to fill out the ranks of the Shia militias or the Shia dominated Iraqi Army. That is if they were lucky enough to survive the last decade. A decade that has seen nearly one million Iraqi deaths.

Speaking to an American financed Afghan television program are three Americans and one Romanian, translated by an Afghan though. We are telling the Afghan people why it is important for them to vote. August 2009.

When the ambassador shows up in your city you meet him at the landing zone with your corrupt governor, your non Pashto speaking army commander, and your KHAD (communist) trained intelligence chief.

With my good friend Jared. Jared’s sharing of his experiences going through some tough times was of unbelievable help to me as I began my recovery. Thank you Jared. Peace brother.

My friend. I don’t know if he is alive or dead. He liked my ties and kept his pistol in that man-purse.

Commemorating the compassion of a man and his donkey amidst the slaughter, suffering, insanity, and the profound and mean stupidity of the Gallipoli campaign in 2015. Melbourne, Australia.

At the announcement of the Afghanistan Study Group in September 2010 in Washington, DC.

With my good friend and liberty mate Scott Macintyre at Camp Fuji, Japan the winter of 2000.

Brits, Americans and one Iraqi, late summer 2004, enjoying some local Iraqi cuisine.

Heavy equipment from my engineer task force getting ready to drop and berm a city in western Anbar Province, Iraq in November 2006. My task force was composed of nearly 300 Marines, Sailors and Soldiers and 100 pieces of rolling equipment, including nearly 50 pieces of engineer equipment. I was later told I had commanded the largest Marine Corps engineer operation of the Iraq War. Within a few years I would not be able to hold a job for more than a few months at a time.

At an outdoor restaurant in the Green Zone. By 2004 Western staffers were unable to leave the Green Zone, safely, without armed escort, and going to dinner in one of Baghdad’s many restaurants was impossible. Rocket and mortar fire were common in Baghdad, so wearing body armor during a dinner out, in one of the restaurants and bars that existed within the confines of the Green Zone, was often seen as a minor inconvenience.

Speaking at a Washington, DC showing of Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars in May 2013.

With Dylan Ratigan on MSNBC in December 2011 discussing the removal of the American forces from Iraq. My anger was at its peak. I remember struggling to maintain my composure as I asked Dylan who would be held responsible for the war, when we as a people would have the courage to face the wrongs, honor the dead and take on the villains. At this point breakdowns were occurring daily, my relationship was in pieces and the numbing narcosis of alcohol was the only thing keeping me alive.

Drinking and eating at the Green Zone Cafe in Baghdad in September 2004, obviously before the suicide bomber hit it.

Marrying my friends Dan and Marsha May 2013 in Maryland. Dan, a Naval officer, would shortly deploy. I can’t say I am prouder of anything more than the Marines I led in Iraq, but in terms of the best things I have done in my life, marrying my friends Dan and Marsha, and Bryce and Casey, are it.

That’s the capitalist spirit Kurdistan! Sulamania, Iraq, 2005.

My route clearance team. Anbar Province, Iraq, 2007. Their job was to drive the roads looking for IEDs. The two burst bombs on the side of the Buffalo indicate that the Buffalo was hit twice, I believe it was hit again after this photo. Other vehicles were hit far more often. I don’t believe any of these Marines were screened for traumatic brain injuries upon our return to the US even though some of them were in at least 7 or 8 IED strikes on their vehicles. I believe I personally was in about 10 convoys and patrols that were hit with IEDs, although, somehow, my vehicle was never hit, just those in front and behind me. Whether that was due to Fortune or dumb luck I don’t know. Not to be outdone, the other Marines in my company searched for IEDs and weapons caches with handheld mine detectors on foot. All of us, on multiple occasions, would dismount our vehicles and walk on foot in front of the vehicles looking for mines and IEDs, at night we would do it with flashlights.

With my good friend Pat, a former Army Ranger. This was the night before I made my first attempt at sobriety. The bar at the top of the W Hotel in Washington, DC overlooking the Treasury Building and the White House, January 31, 2012. The next day I would appear on Hardball with Chris Matthews on MSNBC afraid I would vomit on the set and desperate for an end to it all. Knowing hundreds of thousands of people were watching I decided I couldn’t take my own life and going on as I was was just too painful. I’m still alive.

In Norway.

Malaysia in 2001 with Frank, Bez and some Malaysian paratrooper friends. We got to go places that rich people pay thousands and thousands of dollars to visit.

Sulamania in Kurdistan. Unlike the rest of Iraq is so, so many ways.

When I started speaking publicly against the Afghan War, nearly five years before this interview, I couldn’t have imagined we would be debating war in Iraq again. September, 2014

Visiting Samarra to inspect post-combat reconstruction efforts, either October or November 2004. Note the camera in my left hand. Myself, US Army and Iraqi engineers would diligently photograph our work to document progress, account for expenditures, and illustrate/illuminate a victory narrative for the American command in Baghdad and politicians in Washington, DC. Of course, pictures will not explain the fear, anger and desperation of a people that feel usurped, occupied, displaced and living under existential threat from foreigners, religious extremists, and rivals within their own society, such as the Shia dominated government.

My friend Bryan and a translator confer with a local Iraqi as we conduct post-combat reconstruction efforts in Samarra, a city, 11 years later, that is still a bloody battleground. The man in the suit is dead. The man next to him was once kidnapped and threatened with beheading. Bryan and I had decided to use money we controlled to ransom him, however he was released. Whether he was actually kidnapped is something I could never completely determine, such were the alliances and personalities that existed in the midst of guerrilla and civil war, corruption, and collapse. The boy with the soccer ball…he would be in his twenties now, is he alive, a refugee, an amputee? PTSD, nightmare, depression, chronic health problems most definitely. Does he fight for the Islamic State now out of necessity, survival, hatred, faith…I don’t know, but I would guess, yes, it is very possible he does.

Our single largest one time payout was $1.16 million in October, 2004. Our man calmly put it his briefcase and walked out into Tikrit.

Thanksgiving aboard FOB Danger, November 2004.

The middle of the day sometime in 2005 in Tikrit. Smoke from the constant oil pipeline fires. In the spring the insurgents would seemingly detonate a pipeline nearly every morning, so much that the detonation, from over 20km away, would often serve as my alarm clock.

Paul Bremer transitions the Iraqi Ministry of Youth and Sport to Iraqi control in June 2004. The various ministries had been divvied up to various Iraqi political groups. In this case, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) whose militia, the Badr Corps, fought against many of my friends. With Bremer’s transfer of the ministry went nearly $20 million in cash, directly to SCIRI. $20 million bought a lot of AKs, RPGs and explosives in the summer of 2004…

Courage can be contagious.

War Resisters League. Photo from a Vice News interview I did while in London in November 2014.

At the Sulimania Palace Hotel in Kurdistan, January 2005 with my Kurdish engineer and friend Karzan. The Palace Hotel in Kurdistan was a mainstay for Westerners and foreigners in Sulimania. Able to drink beer in the hotel restaurant, use wi-fi and watch Seinfeld (subtitled in Kurdish) the dissonance in the realities of Iraq could be overwhelming. The Palace was the scene of a modern Great Game, with Americans, Brits, Russians, Turks, Chinese, Koreans and others filling the rooms. Many of them were oil and gas representatives, others were intelligence officers, and some were both.

The majority of Marines and Sailors I led waiting for the flight to take us home at Al Asad Airbase, Anbar Province, Iraq. About 20 of my Marines and Sailors had to remain in Anbar for a few extra weeks. That still bothers me. April 2007.